Pat Harding-Grayson was frowning hard.
“Oh! For goodness sake, Walter!” She cried in exasperation, and looked to Joanne Brenckmann for support. “Joanne, you’re not going to let him be an officer and a gentleman over this nonsense, surely?”
Before the wife of the US Ambassador could reply, Pat Harding-Grayson turned on her husband.
“Really, Walter, if you insist on doing the right thing we’ll be in a fine old situation! So far as Margaret’s concerned you are ‘the last honest American in Oxford’. If you go Fulbright will probably send us another ignorant, bigoted dolt like your predecessor and we’ll be at each other’s throats again in no time flat!”
Walter Brenckmann opened his mouth, planning to defend his Secretary of State. While he could not envisage any circumstances under which J. William Fulbright would ever endorse an ambassadorial candidate who was a ‘dolt’; in the present climate whoever replaced him in Oxford was hardly likely to be another anglophile.
“I don’t like being anybody’s patsy,” he admitted.
Tom Harding-Grayson sipped his soup.
“That’s understandable,” he agreed between sips. “Try looking at it another way.” Sip, sip, sip. “Our countries are about to have a major falling out. Again. Something of an undignified contretemps, I daresay. Regrettable but inevitable, and so forth.” Sip, sip. “The one redeeming aspect of the whole affair will be, assuming that you don’t go all honourable on us, is that you will still be around to carry on apologising for the behaviour of your government,” sip, sip, “and that you happen to be the one American in Christendom that Margaret will probably actually carry on listening to, Walter.”
Joanne Brenckmann realised that she was still very new to the game of being a diplomat’s wife. She had thought she was a fast learner and had been making quite a good fist of things up until then.
Did I really hear Tom say what he just said?
She looked to Pat Grayson-Harding, to the Foreign Secretary who was finishing his soup as if everything was normal, and finally to her husband who was deep in thought behind lawyerly inscrutable eyes.
Her country was going to betray all the people she had been shaking hands with, the futures of all the babies she had cooed over and rocked in her arms, and each and every one of the men, women and children she had met on the streets of Oxford. Her President was going to betray them and he had meant to do it all along.
And there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.
Chapter 11
Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s helicopter put down in a storm of dust on the eastern bank of the Mahabad River.
The river was rising, soon the valley below the city would flood and the annual cycle of inundation would begin again. On another day Babadzhanian would have been curious and watched with more attention as his Mil Mi6 had raced low across the delta of the Simineh River where it fed into Lake Urmia on the trip from to Qoshachay, where the aircraft had put down to drop off several men, pick up others and to have its tanks topped off. Now that the winter had released its grip on the land the low ground was green with verdant new growth; the broad valley of the Zarriné and the Simineh Rivers was turning into a Garden of Eden high in the mountains of Iran.
Mahabad was an ancient city nestling in a bowl-like valley in the mountains. Its population was mainly Kurdish rather than Azeri like the cities to the north and the west. Founded in the mists of time in the era of the Safavid dynasty its original name was Savoujbolagh, a Turkish word meaning ‘cold spring’. Mahabad was one of those mystical places in Asia Minor that had history in its veins, and the blood of countless generations running in its gutters. It had been ruled by the Hasanwâyhids in the tenth century, sacked by descendents of Tamerlane, and after centuries of tribal conflict fallen under the Mukri Kurds — major players in the wars between the Safavid and Ottoman Empires — until the first half of the twentieth century.
Mahabad was a name coined only as recently as 1936, and between 1942 and the end of 1945 it had actually been occupied, like swathes of Northern Iraq and Persia, by the Red Army. That was why Army Group South had such good maps of the region and it had been possible to develop the movement plans of both 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army and 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, using the first hand experience of surviving veterans who had actually served in the region during that period.
“What’s the latest news from Kurochnik?” He demanded as he strode into the forward Headquarters of the 10th Guards Tank Division. Men had leapt to their feet and stood to attention like marble statues on his arrival.
“Comrade Major General Kurochnik reports harassing attacks on his perimeter for a second night, sir!” Babadzhanian was told. “Not so bad last night but he still lost another thirty men.”
Using the bulk of his remaining airborne troops to leapfrog ahead and secure Urmia on the right flank of the two passes through the mountains into Iraq had been a risk; but a risk which had seemed entirely calculated at the time he had signed off on it. Babadzhanian hated this wooded mountain and valley country; there was no visibility, no easy way to root out enemies hiding or dug into the forests or lurking in the rocky gullies high above the narrow roads. Everywhere he went the locals civilians looked at him and his men with dull, inscrutable eyes. He mistrusted their passivity, their muteness; it was as if the people in the villages, towns and cities of Azerbaijan viewed the invaders as simply the latest interlopers to march through their lands and would soon be gone. In a way they were right, lines of communication units were ‘occupying the ground’ behind his tanks but that was all. That the Shah was dead mattered little to these people of the mountains. Up here in the wilderness of the north and west what went on in distant Tehran was of little consequence, one set of overlords was the same as any other.
Babadzhanian brief visit to Sverdlovsk had been a waste of time made bearable only by the decision to release two of the five infantry brigades held in the inappropriately named ‘strategic reserve’ at Chelyabinsk. The men of the brigades in question were mainly conscripts, and no doubt swelled by men who recognised that life in the Red Army was marginally better than in a penal battalion; nonetheless, he could use the brigades to free up ‘real soldiers’ currently engaged on guarding his lines of communication. The harsh truth was that there were no ‘real soldiers’ available to replace casualties like the two hundred dead and wounded veteran airborne troopers in Urmia in the last forty-eight hours.
Up until a week ago there had been a regimental-size mechanised garrison at Urmia, equipped with at least half-a-dozen American supplied M-48 tanks, supported by mobile artillery and a company-sized transport unit. Thus far Kurochnik’s paratroopers had only been up against fiendishly pre-positioned demolition charges and booby traps, and pinned down by small arms fire and sniping. So where were the tanks that had been in Urmia a week ago?
In the country to the west of Mahabad a couple of well positioned tanks — or at a push a man with a machine gun or a rocket launcher, in fact — could block one or both of the vital passes needed for the armour steadily rumbling down the road from Tabriz and Bonab.
Babadzhanian’s two powerful tank armies; on paper they had a combined order of battle of some fifteen hundred tanks, two thirds of them modern T-62s, over two thousand other armoured, or all-terrain vehicles and a strength of approximately two hundred and forty-five thousand men, of whom about half were front line ‘effectives’, was currently strung out across hundreds of kilometres of mountain and upland valley roads. His unstoppable ‘iron fist’ was presently, in purely military terms, the biggest traffic jam in the World!